Walerian Borowczyk
1923-2006
's cinema. Buster Keaton aside, he is cinema's greatest prop specialist. Borowczyk has made clear his "positive feelings towards objects", not to mention a mania for those crafted in the 19th century. Why? Because in these objects we still find "traces of man's hand". after all. Borowczyk isn't pessimistic, rather "catastrophic". Such catastrophism belies a worry that craftsmanship is dying. "Vivacity" is being displaced by what Borowczyk describes as the "mechanical society" - one based on excess. (1968). But images of overproduction and saturation suggest commercial excess too. If the latter result in a "dulling of our senses", Borowczyk's obsessive studies of handcrafted objects now appear as genuinely "erotic", the accent less on their symbolic properties, more on the visual qualities, their sounds and textures. (1972) involve at least one visible human element, albeit one often obscured. To act in front of Borowczyk's camera, the actor has to surrender his (or usually her) will entirely, and become, not so much one of Bresson's "models", but one of Keaton's "props". But like Bresson, Borowczyk discarded character "psychology" as superficial - he's more interested in "how" r…
Films